1. Field of Use
The present disclosure is generally related, in various embodiments, to shapeable coatings. The disclosure relates to a formulation composition for producing a coating for a face plate of an ink jet print head.
2. Background
Organosiloxane network (OSN) based materials are important for a wide-range of industrial applications including durable surface coatings, anti-wetting coatings, dielectric materials, optical waveguides, cosmetics and antifouling coatings. Their properties can be tailored for specific applications through judicious choice of building blocks in a coating formulation.
Ink-jet printing generally involves ejecting ink droplets from orifices in a print head onto some type of receiving media to form a desired image. Printers for use in such printing may use, for example, solid ink or phase change ink. Solid ink or phase change ink printers may receive ink in a solid form, sometimes referred to as solid ink sticks. The solid ink sticks may be inserted through an insertion opening of an ink loader for the printer, and may be moved by a feed mechanism and/or gravity toward a heater plate. The heater plate melts the solid ink impinging on the plate into a liquid that is delivered to a print head assembly for jetting onto a recording medium. The recording medium may be, for example, paper or a liquid layer supported by an intermediate imaging member, such as a metal drum or belt.
A print head assembly of a phase change ink printer may include one or more print heads, each having a plurality of ink jets from which drops of melted solid ink are ejected towards the recording medium. The ink jets of a print head receive the melted ink from an ink supply chamber (or manifold) in the print head which, in turn, receives ink from a source, such as a melted ink reservoir or an ink cartridge. Each ink jet includes a channel having one end connected to the ink supply manifold. The other end of the ink channel has an orifice or nozzle for ejecting drops of ink. The nozzles of the ink jets may be formed in an aperture, or nozzle plate that has openings corresponding to the nozzles of the ink jets. During operation, drop ejecting signals activate actuators in the ink jets to expel drops of fluid from the ink jet nozzles onto the recording medium. By selectively activating the actuators of the ink jets to eject drops as the recording medium and/or print head assembly are moved relative to each other, the deposited drops can be precisely patterned to form particular text and graphic images on the recording medium. An example of a full width array print head is described in U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2009/0046125, which is hereby incorporated by reference herein in its entirety. An example of an ultra-violet curable ink that can be jetted in such a print head is described in U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2007/0123606, which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety.
One difficulty faced by fluid ink jet systems is wetting, drooling, or flooding of inks onto the print head face plate. This may occur as a result of ink contamination of the print head face plate. FIG. 1 illustrates a face plate 5. As shown, the face plate 10 of the print head face plate 5 is displayed with the ink nozzles 15 located along the center strip of the face plate 10. The image shown displays an example of flooding, where ink has drooled 20 out of the nozzles 15 to result in print head failure. The contaminated face plate can cause or contribute to non-firing or missing drops, undersized or otherwise wrong-sized drops, satellites, or misdirected drops on the recording medium, and thus may result in degraded print quality.
As such, there is desired a formulation composition use as a print head face plate coating that maintains high drool pressure and low ink adhesion over the life of the part.